The Whole Internet Is Just Weird Fetish Stuff Now

This is what happens when we let the algorithms take over

I can’t count the number of times this year I’ve been listening to a podcast or watching a video or something and the hosts have tried to push something called Skibidi Toilet on me. It’s hard to tell at times whether they’re doing at earnestly. A lot of them certainly sound genuine enough. But man it seems like a prank.

“You’ve gotta see it to believe it,” they say, “Can’t tell you too much about it, hoo-boy, it defies explanation! Just check it out!”

So then you look it up and find that it’s a cartoon head jumping out of a toilet and yelling “skibbedy dibbedy dobbety dip dip” and it has more views than the Bible. What the hell is this? I feel like I’ve been Gnomed.

Watching this stupid thing again to research this article made me want to skibbedy dibbedy die. I get that I’m getting older and it’s the curse of every generation that we all understand next to nothing about the quirks of the generation that is to follow. People go on about Skibidi Toilet’s deeper storyline like it’s an unfolding Marvel franchise full of memorable characters and astonishing twists. And look, I really struggle to care less about the lore of the Skibidi Toilet Extended Universe, but I’ll readily admit the series seems to have developed quite a bit over the… holy shit, 65 episodes it's on now?

No matter how many people are currently hooked on the flying toilet monsters battle apocalypse thing for the story, I can’t help thinking that’s like the old joke about reading Playboy for the articles. That was never entirely absurd—there were really good articles in Playboy back in the day, just like there’s some... ugh, effort?... in Skibidi Toilet. But I fear its initial runaway success has something behind it beyond just your standard old man confusion about why the gang gang ice cream so good lady is so popular.

Wait, maybe I do know

We spend our whole lives drifting through an ocean of ads, whether we’re aware of them or not. Behind the scenes of day to day life there’s a fierce battle raging for our attention. Until they figure out a way to clone time itself, there will only be a certain number of precious minutes in the lifespan of a human being to shove content into their ears and eyeballs, and even then you’re competing with work, school, religion, and sleep. You have to be efficient.

With the relentless and terrifying march of machine learning, and bots spawned from Google and the Zuckerberg empire that latch onto your frontal lobe like parasites, it’s never been easier to boil away the broth and distil the average human attention span into one recipe that can be bottled. You don’t need decades of research when a computer has studied a billion people’s clicking habits. You just need to ask it what humans are interested in looking at and it will spit out an answer.

And the answer, woe be to us all, is toilets.

Obviously Skibidi Toilet isn’t trying to sell you anything—at least, that’s what I gather—but it’s just inadvertently tapped into something that a bunch of internet marketing people already figured out: Toilets equals clicks. You want your ad to attract attention in the war for eyeballs? Slap a loo on it and watch your audience pour in like businessmen in a 90s movie about Wall Street, screaming into their phones and pointing.  

Oh shit is that a second toilet???

I really don’t want to venture that it’s a sex thing, but my cynicism boils to the surface, here. These are human beings, come on, everything is a sex thing.

I don’t really use TikTok even though I’ve been told over and over again that you have to be a TikTok influencer now if you want to have a snowball’s chance of selling your writing or basically literally anything. But I do grit my teeth and use Facebook occasionally even though I’m aware that it’s also TikTok now and it has been since around the time YouTube also became TikTok. Come to think of it that pivot to video shit really did a number on us, right?

So I’m scrolling Facebook searching in vain for a post written by any of my friends, and I’m instead algorithm-smacked by a thousand videos of women in plunging necklines leaning forward over some enragingly useless craft project and I’m on an immediate countdown waiting for the first inevitable toilet to appear.

Literally nobody is ever going to do that dumb shit. It makes me angry just looking at it because I’ve seen it now and I cannot remove the image from my eyeballs. It squirmed up there and it lives in my brain now along with all of the lyrics to the songs I had to practice for the high school musical I was in 25 years ago.

But I’m not the target demographic for this. I’m actually the weird one, the outlier, the one who fell out of the bell curve and feel nervously surrounded by people who are maybe turned on a little bit by toilets? Just a little bit but enough to click on to whatever this woman is actually selling.

But even worse than horny craft videos are the ads for shitty mobile games. I don’t want to be hyperbolic, so I’ll put it this way: Mobile game ads are worse than 9/11. Yes, I did just directly compare two concepts that aren’t even the same type of noun let alone a workable analogy, that’s how serious I am about this. If you’ve ever seen a video ad in your whole life then you’re most likely familiar with Hero Wars, that game where you control a little guy who has to level up and fight his way through towers of monsters.

Except that you don’t do that and you can’t do that, because the game they show you in these ads literally does not exist anywhere. If you actually do click on these then what you wind up with is some boring city builder or something packed with microtransactions.

This raises a few questions of course which I will address immediately to get them out of the way:

1. “Isn’t that false advertising?” Yes! But the funny thing about that is that there’s nothing anyone can do about that even if it’s technically against the law. Doing something requires suing somebody, but microtransaction games are technically free. Free means there are no damages, no damages means no victim, no victim means no lawsuit. These ads might damage your will to live, but good luck proving that in court.

2. “Why don’t they simply make the game they’re advertising instead of luring you into playing a shit game with footage of something they know is better?” Because they’re ghouls. Because they’re actual demons from Hell. They hate you and they hate God.

But when you’re freed from the shackles of having to use footage of your actual product to entice people in, then it’s okay to lure them with basically anything. So Hero Wars ads usually start with a scenario like this:

A human being came up with that. Our protagonist, minding his own business on the train, when suddenly an evil toilet bursts through the floor and sucks his pants off. And I don’t care what you say, this is definitely a sex thing.

I do want to remind you again that none of this has anything to do with the game. This is what it presents to the world in order to convince people to click on it, and it must work, otherwise they wouldn’t insist on it. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, you could be selling 150 packs of 2x8mm galvanised bronze wood nails, doesn’t matter, put a toilet on the ad. A toilet with poop coming out of it.

It's not just toilets, either. I’m pretty sure you can actually work backward from these ads in order to figure out what the computer algorithms are telling the ad companies that the average person responds to. And that’s some bizarre shit. Like, a really prominent theme is gigantic women.

Sometimes, the gigantic women are spitting into the main characters’ eager mouths.

There’s no reason I need to just pick on this one game, by the way. They’re all like this, they’re all using the same audience retention data that ensures they keep pumping out this crap. It’s easy to imagine yourself a fly on the wall as they’re brainstorming ads for something like the zombie base-builder State of Survival.

“Hmm, looks good, Stanley,” the manager says, “But can I make a suggestion? Take the sexy lady main character and have her fart on somebody. Just show her farting and shitting on people.”

Back in the mid twentytens there was actually a semi-significant controversy about this sort of thing. An ever increasing number of YouTube channels were springing up featuring popular trademarked characters in bizarre recurring situations outside the scope of their usual quirky adventures. Tropes heavily associated with it were things like vaccinations and male pregnancy. Just endless shit-tier Flash animations of things like Sonic the Hedgehog impregnating Spider-Man with a gigantic needle full of green liquid.

They called it Elsagate because Elsa from Frozen was one of the frequently used characters and it’s the actual law now that any scandal or mystery or basically any thing that occurs has to end with the -gate suffix. Nobody knew what was going on but everyone agreed it was probably a sex thing.

The fear of course was that it was actually much worse than your ordinary sex thing because this was the era of the Hillary Clinton child sex trafficking pizza conspiracy lunacy and people were seeing that around every corner.

This was huge on YouTube for a few years and nobody could track down who was producing these videos, which kind of makes it creepier because if 4Chan kids really want to find a Call of Duty player who 360 noscopes them enough times they can identify the habitat of a bird they hear in the microphone background and have 500 pizzas on that kid’s doorstep by the top of the hour.

And in case you’re wondering, no, they never found out who was making these videos. All that happened was that YouTube kind of solved the problem by clamping down much harder on trademark violations, which is kind of like nuking it from orbit.

Personally, not that anyone gives a hot fart about what I think, I doubt it was some sort of grooming operation because I can’t figure out how that would even work. But somebody out there was definitely making fat stacks of YouTube cash by exploiting whatever unholy glitch in our brains transfixes us to this bizarre crap.

That all being said, there’s definitely an element of bitterness in me about this whole thing because getting people to subscribe to a weekly email newsletter is really hard work especially when it’s just nearly 2000 words of unhinged ranting about weird internet trends that I don’t understand, and it’s hard for me to sit back and watch people make bank with this one dumb trick.

That’s why, going forward, all of my articles are going to have headlines like Poopy Toilet Butt Pregnancy, Spit In My Mouth.